IN THE HIGHLANDS OF NEW GUINEA
Paul Ekman put Darwin’s universality thesis to a simple empirical test. The results of this study provoke controversy, ad hominem critique, and sneers at happy-hour conversations at scientific conferences to this day. First, Ekman and his colleague Wallace Friesen took photos of collaborators in Ekman’s lab and actors from the local community, posing the facial muscle configurations of six different emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness (a broad smile involving the twinkle of the eyes), sadness, and surprise—according to Darwin’s detailed descriptions. In a first wave of studies, Ekman and Friesen then asked individuals from Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the United States to choose the word, from six (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise), that best matched the emotion shown in each photo.
The data gathered in this study would pit two radically different conceptions of emotion against one another (see table below).
A SUMMARY OF CONSTRUCTIVIST AND EVOLUTIONARY APPROACHES TO EMOTIONS
QUESTION
CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH
EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH
What is an emotion?
Language, beliefs, concepts
Physiological processes in the body
Are emotions universal?
No
Yes
What are the origins of emotions?
Values, institutions, social practices
Natural selection
An evolutionary approach took shape as Ekman started to publish the findings from this first study. The prevailing view of the day—the social constructivist view—emerged out of the influential writings of anthropologists, such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. These authors had pioneered thinking about cultural relativism, and the endless variability and moral equivalences of different cultures. Within this tradition, emotions are thought of as social constructions, put together in culturally specific ways according to historically situated values, institutions, practices, and rituals. Emotions at their core are concepts, words, and ideas that shape, and are shaped by, discourse practices such as storytelling, poetry, public shaming, or gossip. What about the expression of emotion across cultures—the question that put Ekman on that wobbly plane to New Guinea? Here the constructivist prediction is that the expression of emotion is analogous in origin, form, and predicted cultural variability to spoken language. Cultures select particular phonemes from the dozens of phonemes the human vocal apparatus can produce to express different concepts in words. The same could be true of emotional expression. Members of cultures, the reasoning held, select different muscle movements to express different emotions. The end result is a prediction of endless cultural variability in the meaning of emotional expression.
The observations, mostly anecdotal, in support of this constructivist view were persuasive. The Inuit were never observed to express anger, even in the most frustrating and unjust circumstances, as when their precious canoes were badly damaged by careless mainland tourists. Upon receiving the news of their husbands dying—nobly—in battle, the wives of seventeenth-century Japanese samurai were observed to smile with pride and love.
In Ekman’s first study, individuals from highly modernized cultures demonstrated considerable agreement in their interpretations of the six kinds of facial expressions. The problem, though—quite obvious in the clarity and comfort of hindsight—is that individuals from all of these cultures had been extensively exposed to Western media. Perhaps in those encounters with Hollywood emotion—John Wayne and Doris Day movies, Howdy Doody and Get Smart reruns—Ekman’s participants in different cultures had learned how to interpret the facial expressions that he had presented.
As a result, Ekman voyaged to Papua New Guinea. There he lived for several months with a hill tribe from the Foré (pronounced foray) language group that lived in hunter-gatherer conditions. After receiving the blessings of a witch doctor, Ekman recruited nearly 5 percent of the tribe to participate in his study. The Foré who participated in Ekman’s study had seen no movies or magazines, they did not speak English or pidgin, they had not lived in Western settlements, and they had not worked for Westerners. Given this history, it would be hard to argue how Western concepts could have penetrated the Foré mind to influence how they would interpret the photos Ekman was to present to them.
In the critical study, Ekman used a judgment method known as the Dashiell method, because the preliterate Foré participants were not well practiced in answering multiple-choice questions. Ekman presented participants with a story appropriate for each of the six emotions. For example, the story for sadness was: “the person’s child had died, and he felt sad.” Upon hearing the story, Foré participants, both adults and children, selected the emotional expression, from three different ones presented in photos, that best matched the story. If the Foré participants were simply guessing, one would have expected correct identifications of the facial expressions 33 percent of the time—a result that would have conformed to the predictions of social constructivists and their claims about the cross-cultural variation in emotional expression. Foré adults and children, in contrast, were correct 80 to 90 percent of the time in interpreting the six facial expressions—a finding that would have triggered the smile, raised eyebrows, and bright eyes of admiration in Darwin. Untouched by industrialization and modernity, the Foré interpreted those six facial expressions as you or I would.
ACTION UNITS AND THE OBJECTIVE SUBJECTIVE
When Ekman returned to the United States and first presented his results at a conference in anthropology, he was shouted down from the dais. Ideological accusations rang out in the auditorium. Ekman’s New Guinea data suggested that a biological facet of emotion—the movement of different facial muscles—was universal. Clearly such a notion is at odds with the constructivist claim that biology plays little role in emotion. Perhaps the chorus of critiques arose because Ekman’s data may have been reminiscent of the claims of Social Darwinism—that racial differences are rooted in evolution and biology. Early constructivists like Boas and Mead had soundly routed these Social Darwinist claims (the irony, of course, is that Ekman’s data highlight the deep similarities—presumably shaped by evolution—of people from radically different cultures).
Constructivists countered with the most well-cited study of emotion during this era, one that seductively argued that emotional experiences arise out of interpretations prompted by the particulars of the social context and not any specific physiological response. Perhaps the most definitive demonstration of the constructivist thesis would be to show that the same physiological response could lead to radically different emotions given how people interpret the situation they are in.
Such was the aim of Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer, the authors of this study. In the study, participants were led to believe that the experiment was examining the effects of a vitamin compound, Suproxin, on vision. Most germane to our present interests are the participants who received a shot of epinephrine (adrenaline), which increases blood pressure, heart rate, and the sweatiness of the palms, and who were not told of the effects of the shot. These aroused participants then found themselves in one of two contexts, which unfolded according to theatrical outbursts of a confederate (in cahoots with the experimenter) that would have made the Marx brothers proud. In a euphoria condition, the confederate, sitting across from the heart-palpitating participant in a small room, first crumpled sheets of paper up and attempted jump shots into the trash can. After announcing “I feel like a kid again,” he made a paper airplane and launched it into the air. He shot pieces of paper with a rubber-band slingshot, built a tower out of manila folders, and began shimmying with hula hoops left behind a portable blackboard.
In an anger condition a much different emotional drama took place. The confederate and the participant somberly completed the same five-page questionnaire. After questions about his childhood diseases, his father’s annual income, and psychiatric symptoms family members have presented, the confederate
exploded. When asked how often he had sexual intercourse each week, and “With how many men (other than your father) has your mother had extramarital relationships?” (for which the lowest response category was “4 and under”), the confederate stomped out of the lab room, muttering about the idiocy of the study. Critical to the constructivists’ cause, those aroused participants in the euphoria condition reported being much happier than those in the anger condition. A similar physiological response—elevated fight/flight physiology produced by the epinephrine shot—could lead to radically different emotions depending on the interpretation prompted by the particular context. Constructivists around the world cheered.
This study undermined the very foundation of what would become the evolutionary approach to emotion—that the emotions are embodied in distinct, genetically encoded physiological processes universal to humans and shaped by our evolutionary past. Instead, it would seem that emotions can arise out of any physiological response, depending on the interpretation of that experience. The specificity of emotion—whether we experience shame, love, anger, or compassion—and the very nature of emotional experience are the products of culturally based constructive processes taking place in the rich associative networks of the mind.
To counter this ingenious study and its many implications, Ekman confronted a career-imperiling problem: how to measure emotions objectively. What sort of measure could be relied upon to capture fleeting emotional experiences as they stream by in our affective lives? Ideally, this measure could be captured as close to the experience as possible, and used in labs around the world. The most obvious answer is to ask participants to describe their experiences with words, as Schachter and Singer had done. Perhaps the most miraculous expressions of emotion are through words, as in this poem of love by E. E. Cummings:
which is the very
(in sad this havingest
world) most merry
most fair most rare
—the livingest givingest
girl on this whirlingest
earth?
why you’re
by far the darlingest
who (on this busily
nowhere rollingest
it)’s the dizzily
he most him
—the climbingly fallingest
fool in this trickiest
if?
why i’m
by much the luckiest
what of the wonder
(beingest growingest)
over all under
all hate all fear
—all perfectly dyingest
my and foreverless
thy?
why our
is love and neverless
Notwithstanding the wonders of words, they are inherently limited for studying emotion. The most critical limitation is their temporal relation to experience. When we tell someone how we feel with words, that report is a retrospective reconstruction of an experience. When you report on the delights and frustrations of a day, or your pleasures on a family vacation, or even how a play, art exhibit, or movie moved you, your report is filtered through your current feelings, your intuitive theories of emotional experience, social expectations about what is appropriate to talk about with respect to our inner emotional lives (for example, “how would a mover and shaker express herself here?”), and your personal style (are you prone to repression or dramatic emotional disclosures?). As memories of the emotional experience are dredged up through these filters and then materialize as a set of spoken words, much of the emotional experience remains in the evanescent present of the past, lost. On this, Linda Levine and George Bonanno have found in their research that when people report upon past experiences, be it a disappointing outcome in a presidential election or the death of a loved one, it is their current feelings and how they construe the emotional event that drive their reports of past emotions as much as or more than the original feelings being reported upon.
What was needed was the development of a measure of emotion that approaches the contradictions inherent in a Zen koan. What was needed was an objective, in-the-moment measure that would distill our subjective experiences into unambiguous, quantifiable measures that could be put onto paper and interpreted and debated by scientists. To capture the objective subjective, Ekman and Wallace Friesen devoted seven years, without funding or promise of publication, to developing the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), an anatomically based method for identifying every visible facial muscle movement in the frame-by-frame analysis of facial expression as it occurs in the seamless flow of social interaction. To do so, they boned up on facial anatomy. They trained themselves in the ability to move individual facial muscles (Ekman can roll his eyebrows from one side to the other, like a wave). To document the activity of the more remote muscles in their faces, they stimulated facial muscles layered deep below the surface of the skin with mild electric shock. They then translated how changes in facial appearance—new creases, wrinkles, dimples, bulges—are brought about by different muscle movements, and combinations of muscle movements, into an esoteric language of action units. Ekman and Friesen had given psychological science the first objective mea-sure of specific emotion that could be used in any lab around the world, and in almost any context, as long as the emotional behavior was videotaped and researchers were manic enough to take the 100 hours to learn FACs and the hour required to reliably code a single minute of behavior.
AU
Description
Facial Muscle
Example Image
1
Inner Brow Raiser
Frontalis, pars medialis
2
Outer Brow Raiser
Frontalis, pars lateralis
4
Brow Lowerer
Corrugator supercilii, Depressor supercilii
5
Upper Lid Raiser
Levator palpebrae superioris
6
Cheek Raiser
Orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis
7
Lid Tightener
Orbicularis oculi, pars palpebralis
9
Nose Wrinkler
Levator labii superioris alaquae nasi
10
Upper Lip Raiser
Levator labii superioris
11
Nasolabial Deepener
Zygomaticus minor
12
Lip Corner Puller
Zygomaticus major
In the thirty years since this method of measuring facial expression has been developed and distributed to scientists, hundreds of studies have discovered that the muscle configurations that Darwin described for many emotions correspond to the facial expressions people display when feeling the emotion. Ekman’s work on facial expression catalyzed a new field—affective science—and led to a more precise understanding of the place of emotion in the brain, the role of emotion in social life, parallels between human and nonhuman emotion, and how we all have different emotional styles. For thirty years, scientists have relied on these methods, and those six emotions, to parse human emotional life. Amid the hundreds of studies, the handbooks, the reviews, the new methodologies and old controversies, one finds empirical support for three deep insights into emotion, the focus of the next chapter. Emotions are signs of our deepest commitments. They are wired into our nervous system. Emotions are intuitive guides to our most important ethical judgments. Our pursuit of the meaningful life requires an engagement with emotion. Our jen ratios are revealed in subtle movements of the face.
3
Rational Irrationality
I STILL REMEMBER THE DAY as clear as a bell. Off to the side of the seventh-grade four square game, the love of my life, Lynn Freitas, approached me with hands coyly behind her back. She came unusually close—we were face to face, separated by nine to ten inches—and with a delighted smile framed by her rolling, curly hair asked, “Hey, Dacher, wanna screw?” A surge of thoughts raced through my mind—at last she had recognized my subtle p
repubescent allure, at last my longings would make contact with inexplicable happenings on my middle school playground. As I was in the midst of mumbling an earnest and affirmative reply, she held her hand in front of me, palm up, with a screw lying flat on her tender fingers. All I remember was a roar of laughter from the cabal of finger-pointing girls who had suddenly surrounded me to witness this character assassination.
Had I been a FACS-certified seventh grader and known then what I have learned in studying the nonverbal clues of sexual desire (of which Lynn showed not a scintilla), I probably would have been fooled again; it may be in our best interests to be fooled by those we love. Had I trained my ear to discern the fine acoustics involved in playful teasing, I probably would have detected subtle deviations from truthfulness in the artfully elongated vowels of Lynn’s enunciation (“Hey, Daaacher, wanna screeew”) that would have given away her playful intent. Had I read Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict from 1963, I would have understood why I was fooled, or at least known what to look for when Lynn Freitas made her offer.
Schelling observed that most meaningful exchanges—from the promise of undying love or mutual gain in risky business ventures to the strategic threats of diplomats and negotiators—hinge on solving the commitment problem. The commitment problem has two faces. The first is that we must often put aside self-interested courses of action—offers of affairs, chances to gain at colleagues’ expense, opportunities to lie to company stockholders—in the service of our long-term commitments to one another. Long-term relations require that we transcend narrow, in-the-moment, pleasure-seeking self-interest.
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 4
